Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy

PREFACE

In the decade since the first edition of this book appeared, the basics of storytelling haven’t changed, but resources for storytellers have expanded enormously. The World Wide Web, which no writer foresaw except Mark Twain, has made it easy to do research, seek encouragement, find readers, find publishers, and even become your own publisher.

So for this second edition I’ve used the web extensively to enhance the content of the print on paper. The CD that comes with the book offers a number of resources. Every topic, author, and book I mention has at least one link on the CD that will take you to more information, and in some cases, to the entire text of the work I refer to, available to read online.

You’ll also find links to sites where you can research potential agents, learn what particular publishers require in their submissions, and get a sense of what to expect in a contract.

The CD also contains several of my magazine articles and book reviews, dealing with topics ranging from 19th-century classic SF and particular writing techniques, to how the Internet has affected the writer-reader relationship, particularly in the SF community. Apologies to Mac users — the CD materials are designed for PCs only. However, I have posted these items on my blog Writing Fiction (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/fiction/) as PDFs.

As for the book itself, much of the material has been reorganized and updated. I have also added an appendix: the annotated first chapter of my work in progress, Henderson’s Tenants. It’s an attempt to show how I try to follow my own advice, and I hope you find it useful.

I wish you every success in all your writing projects.

INTRODUCTION

The Challenge of Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

Embarking on a writing career is a real challenge, and the tests are as frightening as anything faced by your favorite literary characters. If you urgently need to define your identity as writer, you risk failure at every step. Maybe you have a hard time telling a story. Or you can tell it but can’t finish it. Maybe you can finish it but can’t quit polishing it. Or you can’t tell it well enough to get it published. It probably won’t be a bestseller, never mind a classic that will survive you and inspire future readers to take up writing. The higher your ambitions, the farther you risk falling.

Like your characters, you’re on a quest. The word quest comes from the Latin quaestio — which means both a seeking and an asking. You are seeking a career as a writer, and asking whether you have the capability for it. You may not always find what you seek or get the answers you want. You know that not every quest ends in glory. But if you really have the writer’s vocation, you’re already on your way.

One of the archetypal characters in any quest is the clever slave or dwarf who carries a bag of needments. Every time the hero gets in a jam, the dwarf whips something useful out of the bag and the quest goes on. This book may help provide your needments if you’re interested in writing science fiction or fantasy.

But don’t consider the advice I offer as the last word or the only word. Science fiction and fantasy can be, and should be, highly individual expressions of universal experience. My expression will not be yours. I have strong opinions about what makes good or bad SF, spellbinding fantasy, or plain old misspelled garbage. Your opinions will surely differ from mine. But if rejecting my views at least helps you articulate your own more clearly, then this book is doing its job.

Here’s the job I hope it does: First, it shows you how to save time, energy, and grief by mastering the craft of storytelling as quickly as possible. Second, it suggests how to market your story as quickly as possible. And finally, it tries to persuade you to go beyond the market. If all you do is try to write for the existing market, you are betraying your craft, your readers, and yourself. If you write for yourself, to express your own vision, you improve your craft, you challenge your readers — and you may even create a new market.

I use the word craft deliberately. Writers can learn craft, but not art. Only your readers can judge whether your craft has risen to the level of art. The craft of fiction is personal, idiosyncratic, finding the universal in the particular. It becomes art when it brings readers to a new state of wakefulness and sensitivity, makes readers think and feel in new ways. If you can do that, you are offering your readers a wonderful gift. Your own work may even make you think and feel differently also.

The industry of fiction, as opposed to craft, consists of interchangeable tales about all-too-familiar characters: Luke Skywalker, Mr. Spock, Conan. Like all clichés, such tales once seemed fresh and new, but their very novelty doomed them to endless repetition. Far from making readers more wakeful or sensitive, industrial-grade fiction puts them to sleep, narrows their sensitivity down to the stock response.

I know — an old joke is new if you’ve never heard it before, and someone’s always encountering Conan or Luke for the first time. The excitement of that moment can give you a lifelong taste for SF or fantasy and for literature in general. If so, wonderful. But formula fiction is the opposite of writing that surprises, upsets, and changes its readers. Readers who never outgrow industrial fantasy and SF seem very sad to me because they miss all but the easiest pleasures of literature.

They are even sadder if they want to become writers. They may never have read anything but formula fiction, often copies of copies of copies. They may argue the merits of this formula writer over that one, but they’re like kids quarreling over whether Boston Pizza is better than Domino’s, while remaining utterly ignorant of Italian cuisine.

Think about J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings has inspired so many imitators. What they don’t imitate is Tolkien himself, who read widely and then wrote a story that sprang out of his well-educated imagination. When he did take ideas or images from earlier works, such as the elves and dwarves of fairy tale and folklore, he made them vividly his own.

So one of the arguments I’m going to make is that to be a really good writer of science fiction or fantasy, you should be reading as widely and deeply outside your genre as you can. You should explore 18th-century English literature, the Latin American magic realists, the legends of Polynesia, and the plays of Aeschylus. You should read the history of the Moghul emperors of India, the sagas of medieval Iceland, and the life of physicist Richard Feynman.

Writers read, and what they write is always a commentary on what they’ve read. What you learn from such reading will serve you well even if you’re determined to build a career as a literary sharecropper, writing formula fiction based on someone else’s ideas instead of your own.

Science fiction and fantasy spring from our love of the new and strange, not from the comfort of the old and familiar. This is why I’m not fond of the clichés that now infest both genres. The only real excuse for using such clichés is to get us into a new perception of the world — including a new perception of clichés themselves! That’s why I’ve included links to cliché lists later on in this book.

It’s also why this book often uses cliché characters and situations to illustrate technical ideas about scene construction, dialogue, and outlining. Chances are you’ll instantly recognize Thewbold the Barbarian and Lieutenant Chang of the Starmarines, and they won’t distract you from the concept I’m trying to explain. If they seem to you to be poking fun at genres you really love, just remember that satire usually attacks what we love but what also drives us crazy. And I have to confess that some of the hokiest, corniest genres are among my guilty pleasures. When I’m laughing at Thewbold, I’m laughing at myself.

The American poet Ezra Pound once said: Literature is news that stays news. If your story really touches on the universal — what always happens, to everyone, everywhere — it will stay news too. People will read your science fiction when your science is obsolete, and your fantasy when real dragons are hatching in high school science projects.

And some of them, when they read your work, will dream of writing too.

The Evolution of Myths into Stories

I assume you want to write novels, though most of my advice applies equally to short stories. In a sense, all literature is fractal — that is, it has the same characteristics and complexity at any level of magnitude. A novel leads us from ignorance to awareness. So does a short story. So does a paragraph. When we finish reading even a single sentence, a word, we know more than when we started reading it.

And what we want to know is that the world makes sense, that it operates on terms that humans can understand and respond to.

Our cave-dwelling ancestors saw a world full of amazing and terrifying forces: fire, flood, lightning, snow. The seasons repeated, but not always the same way. Women gave birth, but not always to live babies. Sometimes the herds of game animals disappeared, or failed to return. Whatever caused these events must be like humans, only far greater.

Explaining the forces of life, our ancestors gave them names and personalities, and tried to deal with them as children deal with parents. Sometimes, if you said the right things and behaved yourself the way the gods wished, you had a successful hunt or a healthy baby. If you misbehaved or failed to show respect, the gods would punish you.

As we slowly learned good behavior, each generation passed its knowledge along to its children in the form of stories about the gods. Heroes were people who behaved well and enjoyed great rewards; sometimes they even became gods themselves. Stories about such people provided examples of good behavior and how it would lead to life as we all want to live it: happily, securely, with plenty of food, warmth, and love.

So one kind of ancient story reflected our wish to live in a world close to our heart’s desire. Other ancient stories portrayed a hideous world in which everything goes wrong and everyone suffers because they’ve misbehaved. Visions of such a world would at least frighten our ancestors into behaving well even if they didn’t want to.

As societies became more complex, the powers of the gods gradually shifted into the human realm. Heroes might have godlike powers, yet be as mortal as the rest of us. We had to admire them — and we also had to obey them or their descendants, which ruling classes always found convenient. If you were a Bronze Age warrior, you got less trouble and more work from the peasants if they thought you were a god’s grandson.

Still more time passed, and stories now dealt with ordinary men and women. They were set in our own world, the supernatural rarely appeared in them, but the stories still followed the old mythical patterns. The universe still rewarded virtue and punished vice; the humble were exalted, and the arrogant overthrown.

In our own time, stories often deal with people who are actually less wise and free than we ourselves are. They still act out the ancient patterns, seeking love or status, but they live in a world where such yearnings are ironic and doomed. The Greeks could tell a story about an arrogant young weaver, Arachne, turned into a spider to teach her modesty. Franz Kafka told a story about Gregor Samsa, a young clerk who turns into a cockroach for no good reason at all.

If you’ve read Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, you’ll recognize that I’m paraphrasing Frye’s creation myth of the origins and evolution of literature. Frye also argues that literature develops in a circular fashion. It starts in myth and evolves at last into irony — literature that pokes fun at the very stories it’s telling. Then it returns to myth to renew itself.

Most people, in any era, don’t want to poke fun at the myths they live by. They just want a good yarn that dramatizes those myths. When ironic literature fails to do so, it ignores a powerful human yearning; so people go back to the original forms, which have persisted in popular literature.

When we write science fiction and fantasy, then, we are returning to our sources. We are still trying to humanize the universe we live in: even Tolkien’s ancient races, the Orcs and Ents, are recognizably like us, and H. G. Wells’s invading Martians can catch cold just as we do. Enormous and incomprehensible forces still rule our world, but now they’re in the hands of ordinary people — the hobbit Frodo with his ring, or Lincoln Powell, the telepathic cop in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.

The Basic Theme of SF and Fantasy: Power

Whether you’re writing SF or fantasy, your basic theme is power and how to use it. Your plot is always a political one: Who should have the power, who should rule, and on what terms? Maybe your hero is an Arachne who pays a high price for her power; maybe she’s like the priestess Arha in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, who abandons her power for the sake of love.

If power is your basic theme, your story — whether a 500-word short story or an epic trilogy — is anecdotal evidence for your particular mythic vision of the world. You are telling us about how the world works in human terms, what kinds of hazards and personal flaws can subvert good behavior, and what kinds of values best inspire such behavior. Your story may take place in a gaudy world of demons and elves or on a satellite of a gas-giant planet 50,000 light-years from here — but it is still a comment about the here and now.

So let us look at the problems you as a writer must overcome.

Part 1

KNOWING YOUR GENRE

1

HARD FACTS FOR FIRST-TIME NOVELISTS

You’re better off understanding the challenge before you get into this business, rather than being disappointed later. So let’s look at the obstacles you face as an unpublished writer trying to break into a very tough market. What follows is a chronology of an extremely lucky first novel, from inspiration to final royalty check.

October 13, 2008: You get a brilliant idea for a novel and begin writing at the rate of 1,000 finished words a day (about four double-spaced manuscript pages). You call the novel Dragonstar.

January 13, 2009: Now, three months later, you complete Dragonstar. The manuscript runs to 90,000 words (about 350 typed pages).

January 14–21, 2009: You carefully proofread before mailing the manuscript to a publisher on January 21.

January 28, 2009: Dragonstar arrives and happens to catch the eye of a senior editor as she passes by the slush pile, where unsolicited manuscripts usually await scanning and rejection by a junior editor. Your first page hooks her; she drops her other projects and takes your manuscript home with her.

February 1, 2009: The editor phones you, says she loves Dragonstar, wants to publish the book, and will send you a confirming letter.

February 15, 2009: The letter and contract arrive by courier. The letter is flattering but lists a lot of changes you should make. The offer is an advance of $5,000 against royalties based on 10 percent of the list price of a hardback edition, and a 50-50 split on the sale of paperback rights (if any). You read, sign, and return the contract by courier the same day.

February 16–March 30, 2009: You revise Dragonstar according to the requests in the editor’s letter, and courier the revised manuscript back to her.

April 30, 2009: First installment of advance arrives: $1,666.66 (one-third of advance payable on signing contract).

July 1, 2009: Second installment of advance arrives: $1,666.66 (payable on receipt of acceptable revised manuscript).

December 31, 2009: This is the earliest possible publication date — too late for the Christmas market. Your publisher postpones Dragonstar to the fall of 2010 and schedules further editing and production accordingly. Meanwhile the publisher is trying to find a paperback house willing to buy the rights. So far, no takers.

April 1–4, 2010: The page proofs — the photocopies of the book’s typeset pages — arrive. You proofread quickly, marveling at how much like a book your story now seems, and you return corrected pages by courier.

May 1, 2010: Your publisher holds a meeting with his sales reps to discuss the new fall catalogue, which mentions Dragonstar. As a first novel, your book doesn’t draw much interest.